Excel and Array’s

My latest guest post, “Using Excel Formulas To Group Your Google Analytics Long Tail Keywords Into Themes
“, is live on Search Engine People’s blog.

This post expands further on my last post, “Living with SSL Search” and covers a fairly simple and quick technique for dealing with theming keyword traffic:

Unfortunately natural language processing tools are not as widely available as we would like and frankly word clouds just do not cut it. This leaves us having to find some kind of a workable kludge to make sense of the information Google Analytics provides. In this case, it is going to be Excel’s formulas. A sample spreadsheet is provided at the end of this post.

You can ready the full post and grab the example spreadsheet with the formula here.

In October Google 2011 announced that all their users will be using SSL search by default. Google’s SSL search was originally rolled out in the USA market and provoked a lively response from the SEO community. SSL search as Google implemented it removed search query information from the referring URL the analytics package on the destination site would see. Google’s SSL search would not pass information about the users search query if:

• Search through a Google domain where SSL search was live,
• While signed into Google accounts, and
• Click on an organic listing (AdWords keyword referrals are still passed).

However SSL search would pass keyword referral information if:

• The search was through a Google domain where SSL search was not live or,
• The user was not logged in or
• The user clicked on an AdWords ad

Whether or not the destination site was or was not using SSL had no effect on this. If the user went from SSL search via an Adwords ad to an unencrypted site, the keyword data was passed, without any concerns for privacy. If the user clicked on an organic link that would take them to an encrypted site, which would ensure that their referrer information remained protected from third parties, it would not be passed. How Google’s SSL search was implemented promoted a lot of discussion around the Internet, some of which I linked to from a previous blog post, which covers this topic in more detail.

Privacy is valuable and priced per click

SSL Search for Google.com.au in Australia

On the 6th of March 2012, Google announced that they were going to be “Bringing more secure search around the globe“. Shortly afterwards, some users noticed that their accounts were using SSL search by default on Google.com.au. It was not long before it was possible to confirm this, and it seems that from now on, Australian online marketers will have to account for (Not Provided) when analysing their organic keyword traffic from Google.

How to Find the Missing Keyword Data?

The short answer is that you can’t. The data is gone, and the best out come would simply be a model. Google has indicated that Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) provides keyword data unaffected by SSL search. For now, the value of the search query data within GWT is not perfect, and provides incomplete and potentially unclear data for most sites.

One technique for dealing with this is to assume that (not provided) keywords as sharing the same composition as known keyword traffic. Assigning (not provided) traffic to groups based on the distribution of known traffic to the site based on mutually exclusive keyword themes is certainly one of the more straight forward approaches.

There are a number of issues that will limit it’s effectiveness. It’s accuracy will diminish with the amount of traffic being modeled. The other issue is that those using SSL search are a different group to those who are not. While the actual difference between someone who is signed in to Google and someone who isn’t might not be clear, it is negligent not to acknowledge the issues this may create. Also as the traffic volume for a specific keyword theme gets smaller, the less reliable it is for modeling anything.

Treating Not Provided as a Keyword

Avinash Kaushik also proposed an alternative approach on his own blog soon after SSL search went live in the USA. He put forward the idea that it is possible to use behavioural metrics to identify the provenance of the unknown search traffic. As per usual, his post is worth reading and fairly in-depth. It does not offer much if you wish to conduct any kind of detailed analysis of organic traffic.

Avinash focused on treating (not provided) as a single homogeneous group, which potentially already matches the behavioural profile of an existing, more easily identifiable group. This approach simplifies reporting and in some cases can at least provide some actionable information. However it does not resolve the main issues SSL search creates, that of tracking the effectiveness of targeted optimisation activity.

Filling in the Keyword Gaps

Assuming (not provided) represents a homogeneous group across an entire site does not provide anything meaningful either. It is better to assess (not provided) traffic at page level based on known traffic and keyword themes the content ranks for and monitor on page content updates, changes in backlink profiles and associated changes in visibility and traffic.

Unfortunately SSL search has made it harder to see small, interesting trends emerge in how people find your site and what they do once they get there. There won’t be enough known data in most cases to create a model, and most of the time, it will just disappear into the noise that is (not provided) and your own known keyword traffic.

We’ll just leave this policy change here…

Last month, Google had an important high court case ruled in their favour. In short, this case means that Google is no longer responsible or obliged to prevent advertisers from directly targeting branded keywords, bringing the Australian market in line with other English-speaking markets such as the UK and USA.

This case was brought by the ACCC and accused Google of “misleading or deceptive conduct” by allowing advertisers to appear for other brands’ names and to use these in their ad copy. The court ruled that Google was an intermediary and as such:

…Google search engine is only a means of communication between advertisers and consumers.

This effectively means that any responsibility regarding misleading or deceptive conduct rests with the advertisers. Some commentators have said that it seems that the advertisers are only likely to run into issues on this should they use their competitors’ brands in their own ad copy. But not if an ad appears for a search on these kinds of keywords.

The Expected Policy Change

Unsurprisingly this rule is finally reflected in Google’s policy towards brand terms. In an update from this week affecting Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, South Korea, and Brazil:

Google will no longer prevent advertisers from selecting a third party’s trademark as a keyword in ads targeting these regions.

In their policy update, Google stated that for these regions they will only respond to trademark complaints regarding advertisers using brands in their copy. However, Google was careful to clearly state that they are in not a position to make recommendations regarding the use of trademarks, as you would expect.

Picking the Change in the Market

While other markets such as the USA and UK have had this policy for a while now, it is still to come into effect for many other countries, including Australia. As a result we cannot be certain of how this will change the way the market behaves around brand terms. Not without looking to the USA and the UK as an example of what to expect. Or waiting for the change to take effect in Australia from the 23rd April.

However it is not hard to predict that this change will certainly lead to some advertising activity across competitors’ brand traffic, and depending how a campaign is implemented, it could in some cases negatively affect organic click through rates. Even though the brand itself should be more efficient than its competition, the cost of traffic will probably rise too and with it the account’s cost per acquisition.

Due to their position there is a strong incentive for the brand to ensure they are covering searches on their name with paid as well as organic listings.This policy change will probably also allow paid search advertisers to employ ambush marketing style tactics on a brand’s own navigational search traffic in interesting ways.

No More Google Brand Police

The decision from last month and this week’s update to their policy means Google is no longer responsible for enforcing rules regarding the use of trademarks in paid search or for how their advertisers use these tools. This ruling appears to let them pass this responsibility on to their advertisers, which is, when you consider how other media platforms work, where it really should lie. It is just fortunate for Google that this should also lead to increased competition and added incentive to advertise for a certain class of keywords.

Not about AdWords Enhanced Campaigns at all*

Google has begun to roll out Enhanced Campaigns, and the reactions have been mixed. At least until the middle of this year the older format, now called Legacy Campaigns, will remain as they are, though any new ones will be Enhanced by default. These changes will add a number of interesting new features to AdWords while simultaneously creating a whole new set of what could politely be called ‘challenges’.

Enhanced Campaigns are described as a step towards helping advertisers deal with changing user behaviour in a multi device world. It is too late to be ahead of the trends and become mobile ready. The shift in user behaviour towards portable touch and hybrid devices has already happened and if you have not adapted already, you are just trying to catch up. AdWords’ Enhanced Campaigns give advertisers more tools for advertising to touch devices like tablets and mobiles. Enhanced Campaigns will target all types of devices by default, sharing one budget and one bid level. Enhanced Campaigns will also provide a number of bid level modifiers. An Enhanced Campaign’s Adgroups will also share advertising copy and ad extensions across devices with the option of selecting some to be used only with mobile. One more minor detail: Enhanced Campaigns do not differentiate between desktop and tablet computers.

There are Features too

Ready to upgrade?

With Legacy Campaigns, if you wanted to target mobile and desktop users separately you would need to set up two separate campaigns using different device targeting options. With Enhanced Campaigns you no longer have this option; each campaign targets all devices by default. Enhanced Campaigns do have the ability to change some settings for mobile. You can mark copy and extensions as preferred for mobile and you can apply a bid modifier to mobile phone traffic. Unfortunately no such options are available for tablets.

Enhanced Campaigns also come with a number of other features, such as support for a few new conversion types, like calls generated by clicks from mobile-optimised websites using new conversion code snippets. Enhanced Campaigns will also give the advertiser greater control over bids by location for different devices. Advertisers now also have the ability to set up extensions at Adgroup level too, and get better tracking for activity on sitelinks.

But Google Thinks They are the Same

The most significant change that Google has introduced with Enhanced Campaigns treats desktop, laptops and tablets as the same thing for targeting purposes. These devices will now always share the same bid, the same ad copy and all other targeting settings in search. Display advertising is the exception to this:

For “Display Network only” campaigns, you can still target the device model or operating system to restrict where your ads are shown. Use the “Advanced mobile and tablet options,” which is the same as in legacy campaigns.

In my experience I have found that tablet traffic is less likely to convert than visitors using a more traditional computer and that the traffic seems to cost less. It isn’t just me, with a number of news sites reporting the same (Google may pull in $5 billion in ad revenue from tablets this year). Given the different cost and effectiveness it makes sense to adjust the bidding strategy between the two kinds of devices. Enhanced Campaigns more or less make this impossible. Obviously this is going to force many advertisers to reassess their bidding strategies.

The Not Quite Generalised Second Price Auction

AdWords is effectively a Generalised Second Price auction with a twist, like the winner of a position on the page is determined by ad rank and not by money. The utility each advertiser would assign each position on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is highly variable. Even ignoring cross vertical competition, not every participant in the auction will assign the traffic the same value.

This difference in perceived value is going to be influenced by a number of factors, including their ability to convert the traffic, the apparent value of each conversion action to the business and perceived value in maintaining a set level of reach and frequency. If the difference is high enough between advertisers, at least for some groups of keywords, it is likely that the bidding is not a Nash equilibrium, as the participant for whom the traffic has a higher utility can bid at the break even point of their competitor with no negative consequences.

AdWords’ Legacy Campaigns make it easy for an advertiser to control which auctions they participated in, even if some other optimisation tools were removed in the past. The differences in behaviour between devices, as well as the impact the destination site’s own user interface (UI) have on different users can have a significant effect on the value of a click to an advertiser.

The difference in the value of traffic from one device to another influences bidding strategy using the available targeting options on platforms like AdWords or Facebook. Enhanced Campaigns will have an impact on this by changing the segmentation of the audience and more specifically by bundling two dissimilar products into one with a different value to what each product had before.

More Competition is Good…

Within my own experience, tablet traffic has been consistently cheaper and performed worse than desktop traffic in AdWords. Even at the lower price, the value of this traffic has made it illogical for some advertisers to bid as high for tablet traffic as they would for other devices. For some advertisers it would even be rational for them not even to try to bid on tablet traffic.

With Enhanced Campaigns, they do not have the choice. Advertisers can no longer adjust for differences in performance between mobile, tablet and desktop in their bidding strategy, except for the adjustment tools available for mobile. Enhanced Campaigns target all devices by default and the performance of this traffic will change to reflect this mix.

Generally speaking, it is likely that this change will increase competition for tablet and mobile traffic, which should also increase the cost of traffic for all advertisers. Assuming that grouping all devices together negatively affects the performance of AdWords traffic for all advertisers and they behave rationally, one scenario is that the cost per click (CPC) will come down relative to desktop traffic prior to this change. However the CPC will almost certainly be higher than what tablet alone generated, and mobile.

This is assuming that all advertisers experience the same issues with getting value from tablet and mobile traffic. In reality this is not likely to be the case, and advertisers able to get a return from tablet and mobile traffic as well as they can with desktop will be able to capitalise on this change. In this scenario, with a large enough share of spend this group is likely to drive the cost of traffic across both tablet and desktop. However reality is rarely neat, and in AdWords you only need to pay what the participant you beat was willing to pay. And if the return you can get from the same traffic is much higher than theirs, then you certainly are not paying up to your break even point.

Markets Following Markets

While I am sure this, as Google would put it, is for the user, there are a number of other likely outcomes for the search giant from this change. Tablets and smartphones are replacing PCs, both in terms of traffic online and in units sold. Some research, including Google’s own Understanding Tablet Use: A Multi-Method Exploration paper, indicate that this growth in tablet web traffic is due to many people switching devices:

By the end 2013 tablets will account for 20 percent of Google’s paid search ad clicks in the U.S., up from 6 percent in January 2012 according to research by Marin Software, a San Francisco-based company that helps large advertisers manage their online advertising.

Given the relatively low cost of tablet traffic to date and the scale and pace of this change in user behaviour, Google needs to ensure that they can make as much money from tablet users as they do from those on PCs. Assuming nothing changes except the switch to portable touch, with prices for search ads up to 17% cheaper than on desktop and advertisers unable to convert users as easily, Google is likely to lose revenue.

While current trends seem to indicate that the cost of tablet traffic is closing the gap on desktop, Enhanced Campaigns will ensure that Google is able to use all advertising inventory effectively and profitably, both for themselves and their clients who are ready for tablet and mobile users.

Spoiler Alert: The Warmest 100

Every year Australia’s major youth focused radio station holds a poll to pick the 100 most popular tracks for the last twelve months. This poll is called the Hottest 100; you may have heard of it. A reasonable proportion of the voting happens online, and unsurpringly, the site gives the voters the option of sharing their responses online. A few Brisbane locals, @nickdrewe (http://nickdrewe.com), @jacktmurphy (http://jacktmurphy.com) and @andythelander (http://thelanded.com), built a site to track this activity on Twitter to show which song might end up on top. Their site is called the http://warmest100.com.au.

It was interesting watching all the commentary surrounding this site, ranging from discussion on its impact on betting for the winners to the creators being accused of ruining all the things and generally being ‘UnAustralian’. Some journalists even described deriving insights from a set of just over 35,000 data points as using ‘Big Data’. The dominant narrative though focused on the role social media had in providing information and its potential use in predicting trends. At least until the countdown started, then the conversation alternated between where the Warmest 100 was wrong as much as where it was right.

When is Enough Data Enough?

Late on Sunday night, just two hours before the close of voting, Drewe conducted his last collection of data, pushing his sample up to a massive 35,081 votes – or roughly 2.7% of the anticipated final vote – further refining his countdown’s final tally.

Hottest 100 cracked as Triple J outsmarted

A 2.7% sample does not sound like a lot. Until you consider that Gallup frequently uses far smaller samples in their polls, such as in their survey on attitudes towards gun law with just over 1000 respondents. Gallup goes to great lengths to ensure that their sample is random. Their methodology is interesting, as Gallup surveys randomly choose respondents by phone number representing all groups within the population and weights the responses appropriately. While Gallup polls are subject to some biases (they won’t ever represent groups without a phone, for example), they are acknowledged as generally being representative of the population.

It is hard to say the same for people choosing to post their vote to Twitter. The Warmest 100 was not using a random sample. Out of the population of people who voted in the Hottest 100, it was by design selecting those that had a Twitter account and decided to share their vote. This biases the information towards one group who share a behaviour that may not be present evenly across the whole population.

The data scraped from Twitter is a convenience sample with a strong self selection bias. Though these biases do not automatically make the data worthless. If adoption of Twitter and its use in this way is uniform enough among the population, it could still be representative.

How Right Should it Have Been?

The percentage of the vote each rank received in the sample

When the Hottest 100 countdown began, it quickly emerged that not every result matched the Warmest 100′s list. This isn’t surprising. Looking at the distribution of the votes for the top 200 responses captured by the Warmest 100 shows that while the top three tracks were well ahead of the rest, the rest of the results tend to group. The distance between each point in the scatter plot reduces as you move further away from number one, and out of the top fifty, there is no reason to assume that their rank in the sample would match the population.

The top ten from the Warmest 100, while not spot on, were still very accurate, with no track more than four spots out of place compared to the Hottest 100. While “Frank Ocean – Lost” actually ranked 8th in the Hottest 100, and not 4th as predicted, Lost’s lowest predicted share of the vote fell between the shares from the sample for the 9th and 7th in the Hottest 100, meaning that this result still fell within two standard errors of the predicted position.

The difference between the real rank and its position in the sample.

Ideally we would want the total votes each track got in the Hottest 100 so we can compare each track’s share of the vote to the figures from the sample. This information would make it easier to establish how representative the sample was of the voting behaviour of the population as a whole. However reality is rarely so accommodating. What is clear is that the further down the Warmest 100′s list you go, the more likely the track’s rank isn’t the same as in the Hottest 100, and the greater the difference between the placements in both.

Sample rank with +/-2 Standard Error

A Confidence Interval (CI) of +/- 2 Standard Error (SE) for each track’s votes determined using the Bootstrap method.

Considering the range that each track’s vote could fall within in comparison to others, the unreliability of the tail end of the sample makes sense. For example, it isn’t until over rank 57 in the sample that the upper range of the Confidence Interval for track 100 no longer overlaps with another’s lower limit. Also the total number of votes each track has in the sample falls dramatically as you move down the list. While the first three results are significantly different from each other those further down the list are closer, meaning even a small level of error could significantly alter their order and the chance that their rank in the Warmest 100 will match the Hottest 100 will be low.

Ranks in the sample with equal, or otherwise shares of the responses

As the actual number of votes each track received in the Hottest 100 is not available, it is not possible to see how close the actual results came to those from the sample in terms of share of the whole vote. Without this information, the expectation that the Warmest 100 would have predicted the share of the vote each song had to within +/-2 SE at least 95% of the time cannot be tested. It does seem that the Warmest 100 is mostly correct for the results with a large number of responses, with the accuracy declining as the number of observed votes fall.

Data Works*

*But sometimes your sample doesn’t.

The positive and negative difference between the real rank of a track and its position in the sample.

The Warmest 100 got the top three tracks right. The top ten were never off by more than four spots and the distance between what Twitter said and what the general population said gets wider from there. As you move down the list the greater the impact an error of only a few votes will have. Even in the top ten, a handful of additional votes for many of the tracks would change its position. As for the lower ranked tracks, as the number of votes in the sample gets smaller any difference in votes recorded, even within the 95% CI range, can change its position significantly.

Conservative estimate.

Even with the potential bias issues mentioned above, it seems that Twitter is fairly accurate for picking large trends for this population. As inaccurate as it was for most of the Hottest 100, it did pick the top three. There is more than one reason why the sample did not accurately represent the other 90, and it isn’t limited to sampling error.

The small amount of data for the tracks further down the list is also a problem, exaggerating the effect of any rate of error on their order. In this case, Twitter provided enough information to predict the top three, but once the number of responses per track fell out of the hundreds, its accuracy predictably declined.

The data used for this analysis and for generating the graphs can be found here.

Answering short travel questions on the results page.

You can see Ana’s thoughts on the topic over here on her post titled “Latest Changes in Google Search Results”.

The kinds of information Google displays on their results seem to get more interesting and complicated. Recently an SEO specialist I work with, Ana Diaz, saw something interesting. A number of travel queries came with a map, with a route, distance and travel time displayed. Like the special dates details seen last month, there was not much either on Google’s blogs or elsewhere online about this.

While it seems that adding this information to the main search results is a new thing from Google, displaying this kind of information isn’t much of a departure for the search engine. Google Now, available on Android, provides the same kind of information automatically based on your location and time of day. Google Maps has also provided this kind of information for a few years now, and has even been providing their traffic data via API.

Google Now’s travel information

Understanding the Query

Unusually easily confused for Google.

Unfortunately, as cool as this new kind of result is, it is easily confused. The map with travel details does not display consistently across a number of queries. While it will show for “St Lucia to Newstead” and “St Lucia from Newstead” (two Brisbane suburbs) it won’t for “Drive from St Lucia to Newstead” or “Travel to St Lucia from Newstead”. It won’t support more than two destinations in a sequence either. For now, it appears to only be able to return a result for “location” “direction” “location”. It will also accept other qualifying location terms like “St Lucia to Newstead Brisbane” or “St Lucia from Newstead Australia”. Just like the fields available in Google Maps.

As in Google Maps, so it is in Google search, for now.

It is interesting how closely the queries used in Google’s main search need to match to the format seen in Google Maps. It seems to indicate that this feature is not as closely integrated with Google’s search as you would expect.

As cool as it is, there are a number of ways this tool seems to fail. A search for “Ascot to Manly” won’t return a map, which isn’t surprising as a number of cities have suburbs with these names. Adding a location qualifier like “Ascot to Manly Brisbane” doesn’t help, nor does the fact that Google is pretty certain I am in Brisbane, QLD. However it will work with “Surry Hills to Paddington”, although there are suburbs called Paddington in both Sydney and Brisbane.

Paddington Sydney or Paddington Brisbane?

How good is it really?

Not so vague in Google Maps

Travel time and distance results in Google’s main search results are interesting, and they do appear to be new. When they work, they are useful, and it does not appear to be using any information that they have not had for a while, or used in the same way elsewhere. It is interesting how sensitive to query structure this feature is, especially given how good Google usually is with poorly structured and spelled searches. Even Google Maps seems to be able to cope with some of the searches that stymied this other feature.

Getting search in your social

Facebook is finally bringing social search. Or more accurately, adding search to social. Facebook has actually been providing a social layer to search for a while now, with both Bing and Blekko using Facebook information to help curate their results for signed in users. Facebook’s Graph Search is different. From the information available to date, it seems to be far more about adding search to their users’ social experience.

The initial rollout will be very limited, with Facebook saying that it will only cover the following areas at first:

People: “friends who live in my city,” “people from my hometown who like hiking,” “friends of friends who have been to Yosemite National Park,” “software engineers who live in San Francisco and like skiing,” “people who like things I like,” “people who like tennis and live nearby”

Photos: “photos I like,” “photos of my family,” “photos of my friends before 1999,” “photos of my friends taken in New York,” “photos of the Eiffel Tower”

Places: “restaurants in San Francisco,” “cities visited by my family,” “Indian restaurants liked by my friends from India,” “tourist attractions in Italy visited by my friends,” “restaurants in New York liked by chefs,” “countries my friends have visited”

Interests: “music my friends like,” “movies liked by people who like movies I like,” “languages my friends speak,” “strategy games played by friends of my friends,” “movies liked by people who are film directors,” “books read by CEOs”

As it is only in limited beta, there isn’t much discussion about its ability to handle natural language queries or what kind of information is available. But there is one other interesting thing to come from today’s announcement: Bing’s involvement.

Bing and Facebook

On their own blog shortly after the announcement from Facebook, Bing outlined how they were involved in “Evolving Search on Facebook”. Bing has worked with Facebook since 2008, starting by powering their web search, with AdCentre placing ads next to the organic results. Since then, their relationship appears to have worked, with Bing continuing to provide search while Facebook took over the ads in 2010 and also hinted at bringing public data from Facebook’s API into their own search experience in October 2009. Far more recently Facebook data has been integrated into Bing’s search results.

Putting the Value into the Search in Social

If all the rage surrounding Facebook’s attempts to find the perfect way to handle EdgeRank is to be believed, they have a real discoverability problem. The news feed works just fine for some light social stalking, and with their existing search features all but broken, it is almost impossible to unearth the kind of information that Facebook seems to want to target with Graph Search, and somehow advertise against.

Graph Search should fix discoverability and provide more navigation tools to their users, allowing Facebook to turn one of the world’s larger collections of user information into something both engaging and useful. Or at least as engaging and useful as the quality of the information it has collected would allow.

Seen from a data perspective, the acquisition of Instagram and Facebook’s integration services such as Spotify make a lot of sense. While Facebook is far more device-agnostic than it used to be, it still does not completely own its users’ online life. Providing a platform and social integration for services such as Spotify and outright buying others like Instagram extends Facebook’s ability to collect information on its users’ behaviour beyond its own touch points.

Why this Matters?

Ultimately Facebook needs impressions. Facebook’s main source of revenue is advertising, from banners to sponsored stories. These ads lose value and more importantly traffic when there is no-one there to look at them. To ensure that there are enough eyeballs to go around for the advertising inventory that Facebook needs to sell to keep the shareholders happy and the servers running, their users need to be kept on the site. And this is where engaging, sticky content comes in. Despite the Internet’s love of a false dichotomy, Graph Search does not need to be about beating Google in search. It merely needs to improve Facebook for its users, so they can help Facebook meet its business objectives.

The gap between where you are and where you should be

3am is not the busiest time of day for search. Nor is it the best for conversions. For organic traffic, this does not matter. Ranks do not change depending on the time of day or week in the search results. The same is not true for paid search.

Search activity and volume change over time, and most of the time, in predictable ways. There are patterns that repeat from day to day, from week to week and from year to year. These changes over time can be important for managing organic search engine marketing. Understanding how demand and interest change and when is important for planning site development and content.

Typically the cycles in demand that are important to search engine optimisation (SEO) are longer than those that matter in paid search (though updates like Caffeine have shortened these). Generating visibility for specific changes in search within the organic results is not as straightforward as a media buy.

Timing and effectiveness are limited by how appropriate the content is for the targeted queries, how successful promotional and linking activity was and how the search engines crawl and rank the content. Paid search does not have the same limitations.

Visibility, Productivity and Competitive Bidding

AdWords Ad Schedule feature

Paid search and display advertising platforms such as AdWords let advertisers manage their campaigns by hour of day and day of the week. How an optimised campaign will use these tools will depend on industry trends, how and when their target market uses search and their own objectives. Unfortunately there is usually more than one advertiser doing this.

Choosing when to push for more traffic and impression share on AdWords and other realtime bidding-based platforms is important. Cost per acquisition (CPA), click through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CVR) are all good indicators for what is performing and what isn’t.

Another factor to take into consideration is competition. If a day or time works for you, it is likely that it would work just as well for your competitors, and be just as desirable to them as a result. Consequently, when a particular time or day stops performing as well as expected, it could be due to increased competetion rather than just the market. AdWords provides a number of metrics that make it possible to analyse for competitive pressure:

• Search impression share
• Average position
• Average cost per click (CPC)
• CTR

Search impression share is the most straightforward of these: it does what it says. The information is available down to ad group level, and assuming these are tightly themed, it will give a good indication of what kind of share of voice you have within those query groups.

The other metrics do not directly measure competition, but they can show its effects. Average position is not a reliable metric. It represents an average of all the positions the ads have appeared in for the period, but gives no indication of spread. However, it can indicate large general movement. Changes in CPC and CTR are more reliable indications of competitive activity. Changes in CPC can signal changes in bidding and CTR can also indicate changes in position. Together these two metrics can indicate changes in competitor activity, barring other confounding factors.

The Why of Benchmarking

Monitoring changes within the account can only provide insights when compared to something. Benchmarking makes the difference between identifying a shift in the market and noise. Choosing what to benchmark campaign changes against will depend on what other information is available. Other campaigns that experience the same user behaviour and market similar products are one possibility; organic search traffic for the same kinds of terms is another covering a similar time period.

While there are a few ways to approach analysing and processing this information to create actionable insights, setting some kind of a benchmark matters. Because of AdWords’ nature, many of the changes in cost and behaviour are as likely to be caused by your competition as by changes made to the campaigns and changes in actual user behaviour. Consequently, it is important to be able to differentiate between each.

Finding dates on Google

Event dates such as the one above seem to be another example of Google’s drive to providing a richer, more informative Search Engine Result Page (SERP). It certainly is interesting that this kind of information seems to have only just started to show up. Especially as earlier this week Google announced a great new tool for webmasters, the Data Highligher.

Now available through Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) the Data Highlighter makes it easier to help Google identify structured data on your site. For now the tool is only available for English language sites and for events related information like concerts, festivals, sporting events and festivals.

The Data Highlighter as it is rolled out will become a popular alternative to Schema.org. It will make some forms of structured data easier to implement while requiring fewer resources and it is included with one of Google’s own widely used tools.

Structured Data’s Slow Burn

Movie Times on Google

Structured date in search isn’t new. Microformats have been around for a while and used by search engines to provide a richer search experience, Schema.org is simply the latest. When Schema.org was released it was overshadowed by Google+, which was announced at the same time.

Unsurprisingly as Google has increased the amount of information it is displaying directly in the search results, structured data has been attracting more and more attention. Google’s release of the Knowledge Graph, the inclusion of structured data preview tools and Bing’s own snapshot feature has certainly indicated an accelerating shift in how search engines serve their customers.

Decision Engines and Portals

The Hobbit Movie

Search is currently far more than just a list of links as Bing, Google and newer products such as Siri and Google Now are getting better able to answer a user’s question directly and without sending them to a different site or application. With the amount of information now available on the SERPs and the tools such as calculator’s and converters usable from the search bar, it is almost as if Google is becoming a portal.

For many stakeholders in search this is a good thing. Users get the information that they want easier and faster by avoiding poorly designed sites and obtuse navigation. Providing a better experience for searchers allows Google to maintain it’s position in the market, and by doing this means the search engine can provide their advertisers a large potential audience.

And view through conversions are gold

Dodgy math and a lot of numbers are a bad mix and paid search provides enough of the former to create ample opportunity for the latter. Like many other forms of online advertising, paid search generates masses of data and often leads some apparent professionals to confuse information with insights. Like many other forms of online advertising, data is easily available through platforms like Adwords which it leads some apparent professionals to confuse information with insights.

Recommendations for account expansion based on historic placement or search query reports filtered for cost per acquisition (CPA) or conversion rate (CVR) isn’t as useful as it may seem. In practice these lists are mostly populated by junk. Placements and queries that just happened to get their one conversion a year within the reporting period on so little traffic it manages to match the criteria used. This isn’t data, and it certainly isn’t an insight. But it can cost you money.

Math to the Rescue!

Fortunately there are simple, robust tools you can used to deal with this. Tools able to find what is likely to work and identify the riskier options. It’s called math. Numeracy and a familiarity with statistics and probability can be useful in marketing. In the scenario outlined above, the biggest issue is determining how close the data collected reflects reality.

Discovering how frequently a conversion occured is easy. Strictly speaking, a conversion rate is a measure of what has happened. Just because Keyword F got a conversion rate of 50% from the sample below does not mean it would do this again over 10 or 100 clicks. This holds true for any of the examples below. While this can be an indication of future performance, assumuing a large enough sample and that nothing changes, as the number of clicks go down, so does the reliability of this number.

How Wrong are You?

While this data won’t necessarily tell you what to expect for the next 10, 20 or 100 clicks, you can determine within what range the actual conversion rate would be. Confidence Intervals can be used to determine the range within which the actual success rate is likely to be 95% (or 50%, or 99%, or whatever) of the time.

Calculating these ranges was done using Wolfram Alpha’s Confidence interval for binomial tool. Unsurprisingly, the smaller the sample used, the greater the range.

Use Numbers Better

There is no excuse for getting this wrong. Not with the easy availability of these kinds of tools and the information to use them. Probability and Statistics is very much relevant to analysing and managing paid search campaigns, much in the same way that Economics can be useful too. Be it constructing a formula in a spreadsheet or using an online calculator, looking a little bit harder at the data you seek to base decisions on isn’t all that hard.